


broken glass

by Anonymous



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Self-Harm, i larb my kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-03 17:05:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14000661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “I love you.” Keith says into Lance’s hair. “I know it doesn’t make it better,”





	broken glass

**Author's Note:**

> hello, im lonely.

  
Lance mumbles tear-jerking deprecation in a language Keith can’t learn. Says sorry too often for it to mean nothing. Lives in a haunted house for a body all year round, expects to be reprimanded for laughing too loudly past midday. Lets people steal things from him and pretends they’re only borrowing and says thank you.

 

-

 

Vulnerability and Lance have a connotation unexpected by the people he meets. Lance who laughs at his own jokes and flirts with anyone he feels like flirting with. Keith has heard a few stories about him already through Pidge, a girl in one of his classes. She’s told him to expect awful faux-suave and even Lance’s over-competitive nature, however Lance is drunk beyond comprehensive words and their could-be-more-formal meeting begins with Keith accidentally spilling his red cup all over Lance’s light blue hoodie.

“Shit.”

Grotesque orange lines that smell like pineapple and vodka dribble into the hoodie and it starts sticking to Lance like a second skin within seconds. He looks at it like it’s a new friend and snorts. When his eyes find Keith, Keith’s half-expecting a pick-up line but instead he gets, “oh my god, a mullet?”

He laughs, half-offended, half-unsure, but ultimately just wanting to make friends. “My hair just grows like this.” And then he tacks on, “I’m sorry about your sweatshirt.”

Lance lifts a slender eyebrow in questioning and waves a hand. Before he can say more a too-loud pop song is blaring through the frat house, prompting the attendees to stop awkwardly clinging to the walls.

“Oh my god, I love this song! Dance with me?” Lance says, like he isn’t soaked with jungle juice.

Keith says yes.

 

-

 

It starts as a crack. Like a black hole, all the light in the room seemingly disappears before azure eyes, sucked in with the ferocity of a torrential downpour and locked in above formidable clouds. Clouds that hover over him in angry bunches and fog his thoughts up and fill his skull with rain. Sometimes it overflows and racks down his body in choking sobs reminiscent of a petulancy one pertains to a teeming child.

 

-

 

Keith is folding, pressing clothes together that smell like sickly sweet comforter with a scrunched up nose when Lance says, “I’m sorry,” for the first time.

Perplexed, Keith looks to Lance, notices his shaking shoulders. Lance clenches his fists and the trembling settles but Keith has already seen.

“What for?”

In equal confusion, Lance stares at him. Keith sets down the towel in his hand, which was the wrong thing to do, he decides, because Lance flinches.

“You’re mad at me.” Lance murmurs.

Keith sees now, the fear and the sickening look Lance wears sometimes like a crown, the expectancy. Keith straightens out and Lance’s shoulders slump further, but he doesn’t stop. He stands before Lance with a benign gleam in his eyes that shares a measure of heartbreak, and, like a whisper, places both naked hands onto his boyfriends shoulders.

Lance meets his eyes. There’s relief there. There’s something else too.

“You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I’ll do better,”

“Do what better?” Keith questions, rubbing hands gently up and down the tops of Lance’s arms.

Lance’s face crumples. Keith suspects he isn’t even sure himself.

 

-

 

“I wasn’t what she wanted.” Lance says, around a lukewarm mug of hot chocolate. “I wasn’t talented like Louis and Veronica,” he pauses, looking at his restless hands in betrayal. “I was too much of a mess.”

“Children should not learn to weather storms, they should learn to play in the rain,” Allura says whimsically, cheeky grin peaking back at him over her own mug of tea. His painful chest eases at her attempt to cheer him up. “If we don’t live up to someone else’s expectations, is it our fault or theirs?” she asks, but doesn’t expect an answer. On days like this, Allura is surprised Lance can speak at all.

Lance frowns, swirls his drink with a spoon. After a while he says, “You don’t think it’s stupid?”

“Lance, sometimes it’s all we can do to hold our heads above water.”

 

-

 

It starts with a crack, and Lance can’t get it to end. It’s a split in his skin, his chest, pounding pounding pounding. He wonders how it got there. How such evilness slithered into the pores of his skin and coded itself in the deoxyribonucleic acid of every cell so his genes screamed painful woes in the middle of the night.

And at the breakfast table. He wonders when it started finding its way into his soggy cereal. When it soaked into the pages of his textbooks and hid behind his friends’ laugher. When the sunshine ran out and the inky blackness found its way in.

So, he thinks, how else to redistribute the sadness than to let it out? Restore the balance, rid himself of the black and the grim and the mean and return all the sunshine he stole, that he doesn’t deserve. It turns to tumors in an accumulation; too big for his small existence.

 

-

 

Lance can’t even remember what he said. Keith is furious.

“Sorry,” Lance says.

Keith just shakes his head. “Stop. You know that wasn’t okay, right? You know she shouldn’t have done that to you?”

Lance doesn’t say anything. He looks down at his threadbare socks, Keith’s scraggly rug underneath them. He wriggles his toes into the fabric.

“Lance,” Keith whispers. Lance meets his eyes and there’s already a peculiar wetness around them.

“It was my fault,” Lance says.

Keith shudders, the anger already fading into something that hurts to look at too closely. “Come here,” he says, holding a hand out. It isn’t a question, but for the first time in his life, Lance feels like he has a choice.

 

-

 

The blade in his hand, so stark against brown skin, singing for action. An angelic choir, gorgeous vocals echoing against the walls of his mind but their song is horrid.

They sing, you’re nothing to them. They sing, mama was right.

The truth is ugly, and there is cruelty in this reality where a pretty boy with an ugly mind brings metal against skin with the only aim to maim.

Badness pores out of his skin thickly, in sticky red dollops that leave tear tracks and run in rivulets between half-healed scratches. The noise quietens and in its absence Lance realizes it didn’t sound like singing at all.

Lance looks in the mirror, then, looks down at the sink, looks back up and sees two of himself, overlapping.

“She w-wanted so- so much of m-me!” Lance chokes, hand grubbing his own wrist meanly, preventing anymore red from dripping into the dirtied sink. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t g-give it to her!”

In moments like this with nothing but pain and anger he thinks, god, there’s nothing left.

 

-

 

Keith has learned to expect lots of things from Lance that he can’t help. The jittering and the fluttering. Although Lance being calm and collected is a nice image, the reality usually means something else.

It’s so late. They’ve been up all night because Keith is worried because Lance hasn’t been himself because because because

Keith sees it in the early morning sunlight and somehow finds it in himself to wish the sun had stopped shining. Lance’s arms marred by marks.

Keith, gently, without thinking, trails a finger down the underside of Lance’s arm, feels him curl tighter against him with a gasp he’s been waiting for all night, any sound to prove Lance is back in Keith’s bedroom.

“I love you.” Keith says into Lance’s hair. “I know it doesn’t make it better,” and then, with a hothead wound up by distress and good intentions that can’t push through, “I can’t imagine my life without you.” It’s harder to admit than the former confession.

Plagued by exhaustion that can’t be improved by sleep, Lance winds his arms tightly around Keith’s waist. “Love you too,” he croaks, hot tears welling in his eyes.

Keith kisses his forehead and tries not to think about it.

 

-

 

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for projecting . Continuation of the other thing but u don’t have to read either or to understand  
> Nice day friends!


End file.
